Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Ethnics and Roughnecks: The Making of the Hollywood Renaissance
- 2 A Cinema for Democracy: John Ford and the Crisis of Modernity, Myth, and Meaning
- 3 Gender and American Character: Frank Capra
- 4 Revisioning Heroic Masculinity: From Ford to Hawks and Zinnemann
- 5 An American Conscience: Elia Kazan's Long Journey Home
- 6 Losing Tomorrow: George Stevens and the American Idea
- 7 Conclusion: Film and America after the Hollywood Renaissance
- Notes
- Filmography
- Index
3 - Gender and American Character: Frank Capra
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Ethnics and Roughnecks: The Making of the Hollywood Renaissance
- 2 A Cinema for Democracy: John Ford and the Crisis of Modernity, Myth, and Meaning
- 3 Gender and American Character: Frank Capra
- 4 Revisioning Heroic Masculinity: From Ford to Hawks and Zinnemann
- 5 An American Conscience: Elia Kazan's Long Journey Home
- 6 Losing Tomorrow: George Stevens and the American Idea
- 7 Conclusion: Film and America after the Hollywood Renaissance
- Notes
- Filmography
- Index
Summary
Ford and Capra
John Ford's personal pilgrimage of faith and belief as represented in The Searchers was not an unusual quest for someone of his era and place. He had considerable company. Most of the directors in what I call the Hollywood Renaissance were involved in similar searches in their work and in their lives. During this era of great transition and turmoil, these directors as a group sought to rediscover and represent American values and beliefs. The result of their efforts was an extraordinary flowering of cinematic and cultural creativity. In this group of directors, the journey of Frank Capra seems especially remarkable considering his impoverished origins in Sicily. Given such humble beginnings, his subsequent fame and achievements are the material of the American myth of success. Looking back to his childhood journey of immigration – crossing the ocean in steerage, traversing the country by train in filthy underclothes to struggling relatives in California – Capra could claim truly to have lived the American dream of triumph over great difficulties and challenges. Although he recalled these events with a powerful awareness of his misery and loneliness at the time – “I hated America” – he never underestimated their importance in transforming his life. As biographer Joseph McBride writes:
The immensity of the ocean, the boy would later say, “drove everything else out of my head.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Hollywood RenaissanceThe Cinema of Democracy in the Era of Ford, Kapra, and Kazan, pp. 56 - 107Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998